PHILADELPHIA – A federal court has dismissed a state court judge’s defamation lawsuit against online news outlet The Daily Beast, which she said damaged her standing as a jurist when it printed that she was aligned with the QAnon group.
The Honorable Paula A. Patrick first filed suit in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania on April 20, 2022 versus The Daily Beast Company, LLC (doing business as “The Daily Beast”) and its reporter Laura Bradley, both of New York, N.Y.
It all began when the plaintiff, Patrick, a judge in the Philadelphia County Court of Common Pleas, ruled in August 2021 that a controversial statue of explorer Christopher Columbus would remain in South Philadelphia’s Marconi Plaza, reversing earlier calls to remove the statue from public view.
It became a source of controversy and a focus of racial injustice protesters in the summer of 2020, during social unrest in Philadelphia, after the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
Many in Philadelphia, a city with a large Italian-American community, said that the statue represented their ancestry. However, others claimed that Columbus and the statue which honors him is a symbol of racism and oppression.
Violent clashes took place between the statue’s defenders and protesters at Marconi Plaza in June 2020, resulting in police responding to the scene in order to control the crowd. In the aftermath of those events and for two years following, the statue was covered by a plywood box, which was then removed and restored the monument to public view once again.
Though the Philadelphia Historical Commission and the City of Philadelphia Board of License and Inspection Review both decided in favor of the statue’s removal, Patrick ruled that the City’s grounds for removal were legally flawed.
On Oct. 9, 2021, defendant The Daily Beast subsequently published an article on the case, authored by its reporter Bradley, with the headline, “QAnon Linked Judge Rules in Unhinged War Over Philly’s Columbus Statue”.
QAnon is an overarching term for a group of Internet conspiracy theories which claim the world is run by an organization of Satan-worshiping pedophiles, and that such individuals include President Joseph R. Biden Jr., Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and George Soros, Hollywood celebrities such as Oprah Winfrey, Tom Hanks and Ellen DeGeneres, in addition to religious figures like Pope Francis and the Dalai Lama.
Patrick vehemently denied any connection to the QAnon group or their beliefs and claimed she has “suffered significant and permanent damages for the false light into which these articles have placed her.”
“In spite of widely available information and reporting that Judge Patrick was not affiliated with or otherwise ‘linked’ to QAnon, The Daily Beast defendants failed to properly investigate the outrageous claims attempting to link a well-respected jurist to a crackpot and unhinged conspiracy group known as QAnon; this failure has resulted in a permanent stain on her otherwise well-regarded and respected reputation, and anyone who searches Judge Patrick will be confronted with the false light presentation that Her Honor is somehow linked to, and therefore guided by, these QAnon lunatics,” the suit stated.
“Aside from a clear disregard for due diligence, The Daily Beast defendants’ publications is a malicious attack upon the character of a dedicated public servant. It is an unfortunate, but all too accurate, statement to say that these defendants value reckless, provocative articles in spite of knowing the truth. The false light into which Judge Patrick has been placed by these defendants has also caused significant professional, personal and emotional damages and harm to her. To the average reader, Judge Patrick is now forever linked to QAnon, as intended by these defendants.”
Patrick, an attorney since 1994 and judge since 2003, also launched an unsuccessful bid for a seat on the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania in 2021.
The Daily Beast and Bradley motioned to dismiss the case on June 17, 2022, standing by the story it printed and countering that Patrick’s false light claims fared no better than the first case she filed connected to these events, in state court.
“The Daily Beast article accurately summarized the two reasons why Judge Patrick recently had garnered substantial public attention. First, in the midst of her campaign for a seat on Pennsylvania’s high court, Judge Patrick gave a lengthy YouTube interview to a QAnon-affiliated talk show host whom she referred to as ‘Prophetess.’ During the interview, Judge Patrick told the Prophetess, ‘I love you guys, and I’m so happy to have met you…you guys are tremendous, and I thank you so much for the opportunity to speak to your audience,” the defendants said.
“During the interview, the Prophetess noted that Judge Patrick was considering attending an upcoming QAnon-affiliated conference, and Judge Patrick responded, ‘Yes.’ Judge Patrick also told The Philadelphia Inquirer that she had been introduced to the Prophetess by Mark Taylor, a QAnon leader who calls himself a ‘Prophet,’ and explained that he had been trying to help her with her Supreme Court campaign. Towards the end of the interview, the Prophetess showed a campaign ad for Judge Patrick, apparently supplied by her campaign. Judge Patrick subsequently appeared on a list of featured speakers for the QAnon-affiliated conference, ‘Patriots Arise, Awakening the Dead!’ But apparently she had second thoughts, later telling the Inquirer that she would not be attending and stating, ‘There’s no way I would link myself to anything that would be questionable like that.”
U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania Judge Joshua D. Wolson decreed on March 20 that the Court did have jurisdiction over the case at issue, but granted the defendants’ attempt to dismiss the case for failure to state a claim upon which relief could be granted, with respect to false light.
UPDATE
On May 24, Wolson issued a memorandum opinion which dismissed Patrick’s suit with prejudice, finding that she did not prove actual malice on the part of The Daily Beast or Bradley. Evidence of such malice was required under the law to prove her remaining false light invasion of privacy claim.
“Judge Patrick’s amended complaint includes words like ‘reckless,’ ‘malicious,’ and ‘knowingly false’ in almost every paragraph, but it lacks the facts to support these legal conclusions. The amended complaint alleges only that: 1) Ms. Bradley used other news sources, rather than completing her own independent investigation, in writing the article; 2) Judge Patrick denied any QAnon link in an interview with The Philadelphia Inquirer; and 3) Defendants disregarded and withheld from readers information about Judge Patrick’s QAnon link. None of these facts, individually or collectively, amounts to actual malice,” Wolson said.
“Therefore, Judge Patrick’s assertions that defendants published the article ‘to harm Judge Patrick, whose politics apparently do not align with those of The Daily Beast defendants’ and other similar claims do not show actual malice. So, my focus must be on the defendants’ malice to the truth.”
Though Wolson found Bradley relied on “other news sources, rather than performing an independent investigation”, he added that such a lack of investigation did not translate to “evidence of actual malice.”
“Judge Patrick does not allege facts to make it plausible that that Ms. Bradley doubted her story or that she had reason to doubt it. Judge Patrick argues that the articles on which Ms. Bradley relied do not support the statement that Judge Patrick was QAnon-linked. I disagree. As Judge Patrick argued in her state court complaint, ‘A proper reading of the April 30, 2021 Inquirer article is that Judge Patrick is linked to or otherwise had an affiliation with QAnon,” Wolson stated.
“Judge Patrick contends that defendants cannot rely on the Inquirer article because it was not hyperlinked in the article. But it is referenced in the sentence ‘[Judge Patrick] told the Inquirer she had no idea why she was listed as a speaker.’ And Judge Patrick put the April Inquirer article at issue by quoting it in her amended complaint to support her argument that defendants acted with actual malice.”
Wolson further pointed out that Judge Patrick’s reliance on her denial of a QAnon link was “misplaced” and the fact that Judge Patrick “denied a QAnon link does not negate her interview with a QAnon supporter or that she was listed as a speaker for a QAnon-affiliated conference”, nor should her denial “have alerted Ms. Bradley that the article was, or even might be, false.”
“Third, the information Judge Patrick asserts defendants withheld does not render false the article’s reference to ‘QAnon-linked.’ The amended complaint claims that defendants withheld that (a) Judge Patrick denied the QAnon link, (b) she did not attend the QAnon-affiliated event, and (c) the interview occurred during Judge Patrick’s campaign for the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania. Had The Daily Beast included all this information in the article, it would not have made the reference to ‘QAnon-linked’ false,” Wolson said.
“Judge Patrick did interview with a QAnon supporter, and her name did appear on a list of speakers for the QAnon-affiliated conference. Those facts weigh in favor of the article’s headline and against a finding of falsity. Maybe the headline wasn’t the most fair weighing of those conflicting facts, but that’s not enough to show actual malice. It is not even clear that defendants withheld the information that Judge Patrick claims. The article reported that Judge Patrick ‘denied that she ever planned to attend a QAnon-affiliated event’ and that ‘she had no idea why she was listed as a speaker.’ Inherent in those statements is that she did not attend the event. The article also noted that Judge Patrick ‘unsuccessfully ran for a seat on the state Supreme Court earlier this year’, though it does not say that the interviews at issue occurred as part of that campaign.”
Wolson reiterated that while research for The Daily Beast article may have been wanting, it was not tantamount to actual malice.
“Finally, even viewed collectively, the actions at issue do not rise to the level of actual malice. Read in the light most favorable to Judge Patrick, they show that The Daily Beast and Ms. Bradley did no real reporting before publishing their story and that they chose to view the facts in a light that was unfavorable to Judge Patrick. That’s harsh, maybe unduly so. And it lays bare any notion that they were engaged in journalism. But it doesn’t make plausible the notion that they knew that their description of Judge Patrick was false. Nor does it demonstrate that The Daily Beast and Ms. Bradley stuck their head in the sand in reckless disregard to the truth,” Wolson said.
The plaintiff was represented by James E. Beasley Jr. and Dion G. Rassias of The Beasley Firm, in Philadelphia.
The defendants were represented by Kaitlin M. Gurney, Leslie Minora and Seth D. Berlin of Ballard Spahr, in Philadelphia and Washington, D.C.
U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania case 2:22-cv-01520
From the Pennsylvania Record: Reach Courts Reporter Nicholas Malfitano at nick.malfitano@therecordinc.com